Finding fundamental operations in language acquisition: Formal features as triggers

The recent history of linguistic theory exhibits a sharp shift to greater abstraction. The shift to abstraction creates a new range of promising and challenging acquisition predictions. We take one goal of all linguistics to be operations permissible within Universal Grammar (UG) may ultimately be, we can expect them to be pointedly visible in the acquisition process. A prediction follows: 1) Abstract Principles predict UG-unique grammars in acquisition. What weight do the words "abstract " and "unique " carry here? "Abstract " means we should find cases where the child executes an operation which is not representable with typical PS nodes (NP,VP, DP, AGRP). "Unique " means we should find cases permitted by UG, but which do not occur in the language being learned or possibly not in any known adult grammar. This follows if the set of grammars generated by UG is substantially larger than the 3000 known human grammars, which is surely true. The child must generate a gramma

Abstract operators in early acquisition

We wish to argue in this paper that abstract operators block extraction fo children (as they do for adults), and that such operators are available in children\u27s syntax already from about the age of three onwards. In particular, we will be concerned with abstract operators in purpose clauses and related constructions in the production data (for example, And the chicken gave it to Bozo to eat, Adam 3;4 file 28, see Appendix A) in a comprehension experiment (for example Where did the boy buy it to splash on his face?). Given the early occurrence of these phonologically null but syntactically complex elements, we propose that the notion of an operator is something very basic in Universal Grammar and that this notion is available as soon as the appropriate syntactic position is available at S-structure